Discourses of Mourning and Rebirth in
Post-Holocaust Israeli Literature: Leah Goldberg's
Lady of the
Castle and Shulamith Hareven's "The Witness"*

Rachel Feldhay Brenner
The University of Wisconsin-Madison

[1] The events of the Holocaust effected a complicated discourse
in Israeli literature. This literature, which had long been
preoccupied with the themes of Israeli nation building, was
suddenly compelled to search for proper modes of response to the
Diaspora destruction. The difficulty of approaching the unspeakable
was compounded from the outset by the Yishuv's powerfully promoted
notion of "a new beginning" which posited "an ideological divide"
between the Diaspora Jews and the Israeli born
sabras
(Yudkin 1984: 1-2). In many of their programmatic statements,
leading politicians and writers of the Yishuv manifested a tendency
to subsume the catastrophe into the triumphant process of Jewish
rebirth. Avraham Shlonsky, for instance, "claimed that the most
significant act of defiance that the inhabitants of the Yishuv
could engage in would be to carry on business as usual and to show
that in at least one corner of the world Jews were thriving"
(Ezrahi 1985-1986:252). Later, this attitude was further
reinforced: public commemorations of the Holocaust have been
designed to emphasize the regenerative force of the Jewish people
as demonstrated in the valiant founding and the heroic defence of
the Jewish State.

[2] Israeli literary discourse, however, has shown growing
discomfort with the manner in which the ideologically promoted
glorification of Israel has superseded the grief and mourning of
the Holocaust destruction. Natan Alterman in "On the Boy Avram,"
Amir Gilboa in "Isaac," and Uri Zvi Greenberg in
River's
Roads, for example, offered the surviving European remnants
consolation, regeneration, and ultimate safety in the Jewish
Homeland. Other writers, however, have highlighted the problematic
aspects of this premise. The implausibility of the survivors'
painless integration into Israeli society emerges in such novels as
Yehuda Amichai's
Not of This Time, Not of This Place and Dan
Ben Amotz's
To Remember, To Forget, which focus on the
return of the survivor-now-Israeli to Genuany to reclaim his past.
Aharon Megged's short story "The Name," Ben-Tzion Tomer's play
Children of the Shadow, and Yosef Bar-Yosef's novel
The
Life and Death of Yonatan Argaman portray the unavoidable
ideological and emotional clash between the native Israeli and the
European survivor. In his survey of Israeli Holocaust literature,
Gershon Shaked maintains that "[these] writers plumb the depth of
the significance of the Holocaust. ...They 'reveal' the weakness of
the 'native Israelis,' who cannot cope with the Holocaust and its
survivors" (1985:280).

[3] Both Leah Goldberg's play
Lady of the Castle (1954)
and Shulamith Hareven's short story "The Witness" (1980)
1 illustrate the failure
of the Israeli to come to terms with the horror of the Holocaust.
The typical insensitivity of the Israeli witness of the European
tragedy towards its victims assumes particular poignancy in that in
both works one of the Israelis is the survivor's
landsman.
The prism of shared history and locale, which have shaped the
formative experience of both characters, brings into focus their
conflicting attitudes towards the past. The referential framework
of common diasporic background highlights the discrepancy between
the need to deny the past and the urgency to assert the
significance of memory that separates the Israeli from the
survivor. The clashing modes of discourse generated by these
characters elucidate the evolving struggle for identity
redefinition, which determines the relationships between the "new"
Israeli Jew and the Holocaust victim.

[4] Written at a time when the ideal of the "new" Israeli Jew
and the notion of
shlilat hagola, the negation of the
Diaspora, were intensely promoted,
Lady of the Castle
presents the story of Lena, a Holocaust orphan in post- war Central
Europe, who is kept hidden away in a Castle by its former owner,
Count Zabrodsky, under the deception that the war is still going
on. Lena is rescued from her captor by two members of the Israeli
Yishuv: Dora, a Youth Aliyah social worker on a mission to discover
the surviving Jewish children in Europe and transfer them to
Israel, and Sand, a librarian searching for remnants of Jewish
libraries for the National Library in Jerusalem. The conflict that
emerges between them and Lena runs counter to the popular myth of
the Holocaust victim gratefully embracing the hope of a new future
embodied in the heroically idealistic Israeli. Dora, who was born
and grew up in Lena's hometown, emigrated to Israel before the war.
She identifies with the notion of the "new" Israeli Jew and
impresses upon Lena the vision of the victim's rebirth in Israel.
It is with tremendous anguish, mistrust, and reluctance that Lena
yields to Dora's pressure and agrees to resettle in Israel. The
drama foregrounds a deep emotional and conceptual disparity between
the ideological "new" Israeli stance of the rescuer and the
unmitigated anguish and loss of the survivor.
Lady of the
Castle does not resolve this tension but, rather, ends on a
note of superficial and uneasy truce.

[5] Hareven's story, "The Witness," actually rules out the
possibility of a mutually acceptable
modus vivendi between
the Israeli and the Holocaust survivor. In a sense, Hareven's
emplotment of the victim's failure to integrate into the Israeli
social network presents a pessimistic, but plausible, sequel to
Goldberg's play. Shlomek, an orphaned Holocaust refugee, gets to
Israel in 1940. The aggressive, practically unanimous, denial of
the Holocaust victim's testimony isolates him in his new home. The
story is told from the point of view of Yotam, the educator in
charge of Shlomek's rehabilitation who, like his newly arrived
pupil, was born in Poland. Yotam espouses the ideology of the
Israeli "hero" and wishes to turn Shlomek into a "real"
sabra. The emotional discrepancy, which characterizes the
relationships between the boy and his teacher results in the
exclusion of the survivor.

[6] Both
Lady of the Castle and "The Witness" present the
treatment of the outsider-survivor as a reflection of the emotional
insecurity of the majority group. Whether emerging from an
underground hiding place in a medieval castle or arriving suddenly
in an agricultural boarding school the survivors, by virtue of
their Holocaust experience, undermine the sense of the familiar and
constitute a threat to the established order. Though written almost
thirty years apart, both texts explore the same discourse of
anxiety generated by the encounter of Israeli rescuer with the
Holocaust survivor. The account of the Holocaust experience in both
texts reveals an irrevocable split between survivor and rescuer. As
each of the plots unfolds, it becomes increasingly evident that the
successful socialization of survivors is predicated upon the
deliberate suppression of their testimony. The social integration
of the survivor depends upon his or her adaptation of the majority
discourse, which has intentionally dissociated itself from the
European tragedy. The psychological underpinnings of this
discourse, which seeks to obliterate the threat that the past
posits for the present, emerge in the multi-layered rhetorical
fabric of the narrative.

[7] To ease the sense of anxiety that the Holocaust evokes in
the majority group, the survivor must adjust and become "like
everybody else" in the new Israeli society. Israeli characters in
both texts express the Yishuv's programmatic vision of Jewish
social rebirth in Eretz Israel. Thus Dora's forecast of Lena's
future takes on imperative undertones: "You will come with us to
Palestine. You'll join a group your age. You'll live, work, you'll
be healthy and free and happy like all the young people"
(LC, p. 58). Yotam's prediction of Shlomek's social
integration reiterates Dora's forecast regarding Lena in both its
message and its form. Yotam promises the refugee that "you'll get
used to it here, and soon you'll look like all of us, and talk like
all of us, and nobody will feel you're not from here. ...Soon
you'll be a
sabra, Shlomo, don't worry..." (TW, p. 38). Dora
repeatedly impresses upon Lena that, since the war is over, she
should relinquish her past experience. Referring to the Count, she
tells Lena, "He's dead, he's a corpse. That's the truth. He belongs
to the world of the dead. But you, a young, healthy, lovely
girl-all of life is still ahead of you"
(LC, p. 71). Yotam
and his pupils act even more excessively. One of the students
complains to Yotam that Shlomek lies about the starvation he
experienced during the war: "We can't take his lies anymore. Now
he's telling us that at the time of the siege they had nothing to
eat except a few potatoes. This is a lie, isn't it? This can't be
true." (TW, p. 41). Yotam attributes the boy's description of his
family's murder to a sense of guilt and to an excessive tendency to
fantasize: "Shlomek's story showed exaggeration and an unusual
degree of unrestrained imagination. I assumed that his family got
lost in a bombing, or that perhaps he felt guilty for having left
them there... maybe he didn't even know what happened to them and
compensated for this with stories of their bizarre death...
Nevertheless, it was the first time in my career as an educator
that I encountered this kind of parental death fantasy" (TW, p.
38).

[8] The perception of the survivor's story as a fantastic
fabrication reveals the deep emotional perturbation evoked by
accounts of Jewish persecution. The tenacity of the rescuer's
attempts to shape the survivor's appearance and mentality in the
image of the "new" Israeli Jew also communicates a profound sense
of insecurity. In his discussion of the emotional dynamics
underlying the relationships between the dominant group and the
"other," Sander Gilman makes the following observation:

[9] Placing the Other beyond the pale...provides the image of
the Other that is the antithesis of self. This chimera of Otherness
is, of course, the result of projection. The need to perceive the
gulf as unbridgeable underlines the closeness of the image of the
Other to the image of self (1986:213).

[10] In terms of Gilman's definition, the Israeli treatment of
the Holocaust survivor as the "other" reveals both the extent of
the rescuer's identification with the victim and the fear of such
affinity. At the unconscious level, the rescuers recognize the
survivors as their alter-egos and, at the same time, reject them as
such. In order to gain confidence in Jewish potency, the Israeli
Jew must eliminate the past of Jewish helplessness. The survivor,
who embodies Jewish weakness, represents therefore a threat to the
group whose
raison d' etre is rooted in an internalized
image of the free, powerful, and future-oriented "new" Jew.

[11] As Gila Ramras-Rauch reminds us, the encounter between the
Yishuv member and the Holocaust victim signifies "the 'Israeli
nature'...pitted against the 'Jewish nature"' (1985:8). Adherence
to the self-image of the persecuted Jew threatens the ideal of
Jewish self-sufficiency. The eradication of the "shameful" past is
necessary for the creation of a triumphant future. Since the
viability of the Israeli-Zionist orientation is predicated upon the
psychological "conversion" of the survivor, the encounter between
survivor and rescuer turns into a conceptual and emotional
battle-ground.

[12] The biographical closeness between rescuer and survivor in
Lady of the Castle and "The Witness" creates an antagonism,
which reveals deeply embedded layers of unacknowledged guilt and
fear. On her mission to Europe, Dora returns to the place where she
was born only to discover in Lena an emotionally threatening
reflection of herself as a young girl. Similarly, the appearance of
Shlomek, the fugitive from Poland, invokes Yotam's reluctant
recollection of his Polish origins and of his own arrival in Israel
as a young boy. The survivors' birthplaces and ages signify a
kinship that the European-born Dora and Yotam find emotionally
impossible to acknowledge. These emissaries from a deliberately
forgotten past threaten their painfully achieved and precariously
maintained sense of control, confidence, and potency.
Interestingly, the Israeli-born charactersDora's companion, Sand,
and Yotam's colleague, Rutaare capable of a more comprehending,
empathic attitude towards the survivor. Thus, when Dora, terrified
that Lena will choose death over life, practically wrestles with
her over the talisman, which contains poison, Sand acknowledges the
survivor's freedom of choice. He assures Lena, "I swear to you by
everything that's holy to me: we won't take anything away from you,
we won't force you to do anything against your will"
(LC, p.
62). Yotam interprets Shlomek's persistent refusal to talk about
his past as a positive sign of reorientation towards the future,
telling Ruta, "Here people are reborn, you know it as well as I
do." Ruta, who perceives Shlomek's withdrawal as a failure of the
educational system, responds sarcastically, "In this school,
somehow we are too small to qualify as midwives" (TW, p. 45).

[13] Whereas the Israeli-born characters are capable of
empathizing with the survivors' desire to assert their freedom, the
common origins of the European-born rescuers and survivors seem to
preclude such empathy. In addition to bringing home the well-known
discourse of suffering that the "reborn" Jew in Israel would rather
forget the survivor's experience exacerbates the sense of guilt and
fear in that it confronts the European-born Israelis with the
arbitrariness of their own survival. It is Lena who confronts Dora
with the simple truth of historical fortuity. Speaking of her
relatives who emigrated to Israel before the war, she says
bitterly, "I don't care. They got away, they're alive over there!
And I was hereI could've died, I could've been murderedwhat do they
care..."
(LC, p. 70). The consciousness of a purely
accidental escape from victimization clashes with the concept of
the strong Jew in control of destiny. As the darkest chapter in
Jewish history, the Holocaust is unacceptable to the Jew who is
determined to write a new chapter of Jewish courage and
self-determination.

[14] Ironically, the efforts to divert attention from Jewish
suffering in Europe to Jewish revival in Israel demonstrate the
vulnerability of the "new" Jew who claims to have been liberated
from the legacy of the Diaspora. Dora's unresolved ambivalence
emerges in her emphatic denouncement of the "old" country. While
identifying the surroundings of the Castle as her birthplace, she
claims to experience a sense of total alienation: "I was born here,
I grew up here, spent my childhood here. And suddenlyit's all so
unreal, so strange and alien! The cities, the villages, the
monasteriesthey're no longer real to me! My home is in Palestine!"
At the same time, quite inconsistently, she explains why Sand
cannot understand her agitation upon finding herself in this place.
"Because this country," she tells him, "is really strange for you!
But for methis was once my home"
(LC, pp. 12-13). By
stressing that the country is "really strange" for Sand, Dora
contradicts the preceding statement about her sense of complete
detachment from her native land. Her insistence on the
exclusiveness of Israel as her home indicates the complexity of the
feelings that tie her to the past she wishes to obliterate. Dora 's
ambivalent feelings about her birthplace communicate her hostile,
yet impassioned, attachment to the "old" country.

[15] A similar wish to eradicate the memory of the Diaspora
informs Yotam's conduct. The force of Yotam's need to define
himself as an Israeli is manifest in his childish claim to have
arrived in Israel at the age of five (TW, p. 42) and in his
reluctant confession that he actually came at the age of eleven
(TW, p. 45). Yotam refuses to acknowledge that he knows Polish even
in a case of emergency when Shlomek's well-being depends on it. He
admits, however, that his contempt for his mother is grounded in
his pro- found resentment of her insistence to communicate with him
in Polish. "My mother," says Yotam, "insists on telling people that
I was eleven when I came here. She annoys me terribly. She is an
old woman and has a limited understanding of natural things." "My
mother," he adds, "insists on speak- ing Polish to me and even
writes to me in this language, which makes me squirm" (TW, pp. 45
and 48). Yotam's estrangement from his mother as well as his
mother-tongue reflects his unrealistic desire to literally
obliterate his roots and be reborn as an Israeli. Ironically,
Yotam's driving need to actualize the ideal of the strong,
straightforward
sabra induces him to forfeit his integrity.
His uncritical adherence to the prevalent ideology of Jewish heroic
self-sufficiency implies a deep fear of the weakness associated
with the Diaspora. Like Dora, Yotam suppresses this fear through
deliberate attempts to deny and disown his past. Both Dora and
Yotam recognize in the Holocaust victims that part of the self
which they have been striving to repress and "forget."

[16] Hans Meyerhoff reminds us of the inseparability of memory
and self:

[17] all psychological theories...have emphasized the integral
relationship between memory and the self. The past...leaves
records, whereas the future does not...I know who I am by virtue of
the records and relations constituting the memory which I call my
own (1968:43).

[18] Whereas the European-born Israelis consciously estrange
themselves from their past and strive to establish a new identity,
the survivors insist on keeping the memory alive in order to assert
their true identity. The appearance of the survivors and their
insistence on reaffirming the past defy the rescuers. The ensuing
power struggle between rescuer and survivor is brought forth in the
discourse of conflicting notions of identity.

[19] Lena, who seems to be wholly dependent upon her rescuers,
be it the Count or the Israelis, is actually unyielding in her
determination to hold on to the past. She repeatedly retreats to
her subterranean hiding place where, like the mythological
Persephone, she disappears into the darkness of her personal hell
to mourn her murdered family. Unlike Persephone's loss, however,
Lena's loss is irreversible. Whether imprisoned in the Castle or
faced with the demand to reenter the world, Lena asserts her
identity, maintaining the "integral relationships between memory
and self' by living out her experience of horror. For Lena, the
nightmare of the Holocaust persists even though, for the outside
world, the war has ended. In her own world she is still alone in
the dark forest, running away from the Nazis, seeking comfort in
her childhood songs.

[20] The reality of the war continues to persist for Shlomek as
well. Having emerged from the nightmare of Europe, Shlomek
continually relives his losses despite the drastic change of
environment. The vividness of his mourning is manifest in his
compulsion to reconstruct the experience. Shlomek's identity was
largely shaped by his eyewitness experience of his community's and
family's suffering and murder. Denied the opportunity to share the
story with his Israeli teachers and peers, Shlomek, like Lena,
defies the pressure to compromise his need to mourn the past and
exercises his prerogative to return to his private hell. The story
of his family's death, written surreptitiously at night, attests to
the survivor's indelible connection with his past. Shlomek writes
the testimony of his family's murder in his mother-tongue, Polish.
This confluence of memory and discourse defines the contrast
between the survivor and his Israeli antagonist, Yotam, who has
eliminated all discourse with the past.

[21] The survivors' tenacious attachment to their memories
engenders the rescuers' growing sense of powerlessness
vis-à-vis the victim. Both Dora and Yotam encounter
resistance and ultimately fail in their attempts to reshape the
survivor's views. Lena finds it impossible to identify with Dora's
outlook of a history-free, future oriented society in Israel.
Shlomek tries to join this society but refuses to adjust. In both
cases the integrity of self and memory precludes a successful
process of indoctrination.

[22] The power struggle between rescuer and survivor is
translated into a discourse, which intends to reform the identity
of the survivor and involves the infusion of familiar terms with
new meanings. This amounts to a linguistically imposed
transformation intended to engender new modes of thinking. The
process of such conceptual subversion constitutes a tool of
psychological oppression aimed at shaping the outsider's identity
in conformity with that of the dominant majority. The notion that
linguistic transformation will generate the desired mode of
thinking underlies and informs the treatment of the survivors in
both works.

[23] When Ludwig Wittgenstein speaks about the multiplicity of
linguistic forms, he observes that

[24] This multiplicity is not something fixed, given once for
all...new language-games...come into existence, and others become
obsolete and get forgotten...Here the term "language-game" is meant
to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language
is...a form of life (1968: 23).

[25] A game presupposes a partner; speech presupposes a
listener. Language usage is, therefore, an activity, which
naturally entails a social transaction: it is "a form of life" in
that it represents the continually evolving experience of
interpersonal communication. Wittgenstein submits that some
"language-games" become naturally "obsolete," and others "get
forgotten." In our texts, the deposition of unwanted
"language-games" is effected through aggressive restrictions of
linguistic transactions.

[26] The dominant rescuers condition the survivors'
socialization upon the adoption of their normative language
patterns: the "life" of social intercourse may be maintained only
when the survivor renounces the discourse, which bears upon the
past. Most forms of verbal socialization, or in Wittgenstein's
terms, "language-games," establish the inferiority of one partner,
placing him/her in what R. D. Laing terms an "untenable position"
of inauthenticity whereby one is expected "to not be oneself, to be
false to oneself: to be not as one appears to be, to be
counterfeit" (1976:127). The linguistic transaction that the
rescuer wishes to pursue with the survivor as part of the
socialization process belongs to this group of language games. The
suppression of the old discourse makes it possible for the new
discourse to take over by obliterating the language, which has
informed the survivor's past. Consequently, the espousal of a new
discourse validates the new "form of life" at the cost of
self-betrayal.

[27] The rejection of anything "old" is essential to a society,
which cultivates the self-image of vibrant youth and energetic
activity. Upon Shlomek's arrival, Yotam observes "that he knew a
little Hebrew, the kind of Hebrew of 'Tarbut' schools, the Hebrew
that here only old people are allowed to speak..." (TW, p. 36). The
allusion to "Tarbut" schools, the Jewish educational network in
Eastern Europe, associates the Hebrew spoken in the Diaspora with
the old, outdated Jewish way of life. Consequently, as "a form of
life," the Diaspora Hebrew, characterized by its classical lexicon
and grammatical accuracy, is tolerated "only" in old people, the
relics of the past, but is not acceptable in the young who are
supposed to be building a future liberated from the past.

[28] Internalization of the prescribed language patterns signals
a shifting worldview. Yotam recalls Shlomek's increasingly
inaccurate Hebrew: "He would already confuse the feminine and
masculine gender, saying, for instance, '
shteim-asar elef.'
But I did not correct him. Let him make mistakes, I said to
myself. That's part of his adjustment. Let him become one of the
group" (TW, p. 45). Thus, in his role of the survivor's rescuer,
Yotam sees Shlomek's mistakes as "evidence of his adjustment." By
abandoning the forms practiced in Diaspora, Shlomek, in Yotam's
view, shows signs of identity transformation. Ironically, Yotam
condones linguistic inaccuracies for the sole reason that they are
espoused by the dominant group. "Since the future is theirs, not
ours," (TW, p. 45) as Yotam sees it, young people are free to take
liberty with language patterns as part of their
"language-game."

[29] The confluence of language and doctrine does not stop at
the level of grammatical impurities. The intent to suppress the
survivor's experience is also manifest in an attempt to invalidate
his/her language at the level of its contextual structure. The
manipulative shifting of the language's referential frames
undermines connotations rooted in the past. The aggressive aspect
of such a "language-game" emerges in the encounter between Yotam
and Shlomek over the interpretation of the talmudic saying,
o
chevruta o mitutathe absence of camaraderie amounts to death.
For Yotam, this expression signifies the quintessence of social
homogeneity and togetherness: the group conformity, "chevruta," is
the preferred alternative to death-like isolation. But while Yotam
focuses on the dire consequences of failing to become "like
everybody else," Shlomek suggests a different interpretation. He
tells Yotam that in his school
"chevruta signified the
companionship of Torah students." For Shlomek, the expression
designated two essential principles in the Jewish tradition of
study: the sacred duty to study the Torah and the importance of the
study as a social act. "And what are we," Yotam retorts
triumphantly, "if not a company of students?" (TW, p. 42).

[30] Yotam's reconstruction of Shlomek's definition not only
distorts Shlomek's interpretation of the saying but invalidates the
contextual significance of this interpretation. The omission of the
qualifier "Torah" defines social interaction as the only
life-giving tenet. While Shlomek perceives the Torah group study as
"a form of life," Yotam's deliberate exclusion of the
cultural-religious component in Shlomek's interpretation
invalidates the survivor's experience of Torah study. The liberty
that Yotam takes in reinterpreting Shlomek's definition is hardly
accidental. The separation of the two traditionally inseparable
components of maintaining Jewish congregational togetherness
promulgates the notion of the "new" Israeli Jew. Yotam's
"language-game" is part of the effort to diminish the tradition of
Torah studies by defining it as Jewish preoccupation with the
past.

[31] Such intentional manipulations of the contextual meaning of
language invalidate the formative experiences of the outsider and
eventually reduce him to silence. Shlomek's silence, however, does
not imply acquiescence to the reconstructed version of his
experience. On the contrary, it signals an ensuing preoccupation
with a "language-game" which would revalidate this experience.
Subsequently, Shlomek resorts to a private language which restores
his authenticity: he designs a code which commemorates the names
and ages of his murdered family members: "Yud-39, Beth-37,
Aleph-12, Yud-8" (TW, p. 44). The code, which he engraves, writes,
and scribbles everywhere, for everybody to see, embodies a
self-assertion that defies language manipulation. This retaliatory
activity subverts the intent to negate the past through referential
distortion. As an idiosyncratic set of signifiers, the code has
only one signified, the signified, which reaffirms, once again,
"the integral relationship between the memory and the self."

[32] In
Lady of the Castle, as in "The Witness," the sign
which affirms the survivor's identity and independence serves to
relate the past experience of death and suffering to the present.
Like Shlomek, Lena also clings to memories of death in order to
preserve the integrity of her authentic self. Her secret sign takes
the form of the parting gift from her mother: a talisman filled
with poison. In the reality of the Holocaust, the semiology of a
talisman undergoes a significant process of deconstruction: it no
longer signifies a fortunate life but rather the good fortune of
suicide. In the post-Holocaust reality, however, the talisman
undergoes another semantic transmutation. As an emblem of death, it
signifies the survivor's link with the past. Both rescue operations
to which Lena is subjected seek to annul her memory of death and
loss. While the Count chooses to ignore the existence of the
talisman, Dora tries to take it away from Lena by force. Like
Shlomek's code, Lena's talisman, therefore, constitutes a private
sign of defiance against the invalidation of the past for the sake
of the future.

[33] The rhetorical similarity which characterizes Lena's
encounters with the Count on the one hand, and Dora and Sand on the
other hand, binds all the rescuers with a common motif of
ideological appropriation of the survivor through peremptory
displacement of linguistic signification. Such a reading of Lena's
relationships with her rescuers contradicts critical readings,
which have focused on the contrasting world pictures represented by
Count Zabrodsky and Dr. Dora Ringler
2.
Gershon Shaked, in particular, outlines the opposition between the
Count and Dora in terms of the age-old humanist tradition of
European culture versus the cannibalistic vulgarity of modernity.
His critical reading focuses on the theme of the heritage of
refined beauty and erudition that was destroyed and replaced by the
worship of technocratic efficiency. According to Shaked, the
confrontation between the Count and Dora, seemingly over Lena's
future happiness, signifies, in fact, the defeat of cultural
uniqueness and the victory of the cult of the masses (Shaked
1958:186-190).

[34] Dora, in her advocacy of egalitarianism and rationalism, is
indeed situated in direct opposition to the Count's elitism and
mysticism. Yet, while the ideologies that Dora and the Count
represent may contradict each other, their methods of
implementation are similar and equally ruthless. Both seek to
appropriate Lena through manipulative "language-games." And in this
regard the Count is a counterpart to Dora's aggressive dogmatism
rather than her opponent. The Count's will to power, as it emerges
in his relationship with Lena, is as intense as Dora's. The
discourses in which both Dora and the Count engage Lena manifest
similar ends and means. They aim to reshape the survivor's
worldview to fit the "forms of life" that suit her rescuers'
self-interests. Hence, the victim's language of loss and death must
be replaced by the rescuers' respective visions of redemption.
Whereas Dora wishes to transfer Lena into Israel, her own refuge
from the haunting memories of the past, the Count imprisons Lena in
the Castle, which is his refuge from the threatening invasion of
the future. Whereas Dora impresses upon Lena the hope of
regeneration and rebirth in Israel, the Count infuses Lena with the
hope of regeneration and rebirth in "the fourth Kingdom."
3

[35] By deceptively prolonging the nightmare of the Nazi threat,
the Count creates an atmosphere that is conducive to Lena 's
conversion to his mystical vision of redemption drawn from
The
Revelation to John and
The Book of Daniel. In this
atmosphere of constant fear and complete isolation from the world,
the language of the vision, which promises peace and security, has
permeated the captive's worldview. In her conversation with Dora,
Lena constantly resorts to the eschatological imagery from John's
vision to counteract Dora's offer of new life. For instance, when
Dora offers assurances that it will not be hard for her to start a
new life in Israel, as all the other survivors have, Lena responds
with a vision of the Kingdom in which there is no "second death,"
that is, the New Jerusalem of eternal life. As Lena admits, the
Count's teachings shaped her "dream" at the time "when there was no
more hope, when I knew I would die"
(LC, p. 72). The
mystical rhetoric of redemption infiltrated Lena's language at the
most vulnerable stage of her survival. To fend off despair, she
consciously embraced both the dream and the dream giver
(LC,
p. 56).

[36] Although it is conceptually antithetical to the Count's
Christian mysticism, the vision of "normal life" that Dora presents
must appear to the war victim as fantastic and dreamlike as the
Count's vision of the afterlife. Dora offers to take Lena away from
the country and the people who witnessed and abetted her family's
murder. She promises her freedom, peace, and joy in her new
homeland. Inadvertently, Dora's description of life in Eretz
Israel, though concrete and down to earth, is strikingly similar to
John's Revelation of New Jerusalem, the city of peace and light
where no evil will be admitted: "But nothing that is impure will
enter the city, nor anyone who does shameful things or tells lies"
(chap. 22). Both Dora and the Count offer Lena visions of
regeneration and emotional rebirth, and both offerings are couched
in vocabularies of renewal that seek to supersede the survivor's
memory of horror. Much like the Count's mystical aspirations,
Dora's rational propositions are designed to attenuate the
survivor's constant recourse to the past. Both are intended to
de-intensify Lena 's recollections in which pre-war innocence
coalesces horribly with the devastation of the Holocaust
experience.

[37] Lena, however, continuously tries to communicate her
experiences. She seeks to involve Dora in her ordeal by focusing on
a song that they both knew as children. This song, she recalls,
"helped me a bit" to overcome the fear of the dark forest when
fleeing from the Nazis who "took" her parents and siblings
(LC, p. 54). By referring to a song that Dora knows, Lena
attempts to place her experience in a familiar referential
framework. At the same time, the associations that the song invokes
demonstrate that the memories of death and horror have irrevocably
transposed the experience of a happy childhood. Pointedly, Dora
chooses not to relate to the song. Instead, she manipulates the
victim's need to share memories and grief in order to promote her
vision of a new life for Lena: "You will tell [your aunt in
Palestine] this whole story yourself,"
(LC, p. 70) she tells
Lena. The survivor's experience, purposely de-personalized as "this
whole story," is thus skillfully used in a "language-game" meant to
"save" Lena by taking her to Israel.

[38] In this sense a strategy akin to that of Yotam in relation
to Shlomek's testimony emerges in Dora' s response. Both rescuers
deflect the acuteness of the survivor's need to tell about the
experience. They downplay the tragic circumstances of the event and
advise the victim to defer the telling. Thus Yotam suggests to
Shlomek that he refrain from telling the story altogether in order
"not to irritate the class" (TW, p. 41), and to the end he deplores
the fact that Shlomek did not wait longer before publishing his
testimony. Dora simply puts off the telling until Lena gets to see
her relatives in Israel. Neither Yotam nor Dora respond directly to
the experience as addressed to them. Their reticence reflects a
reluctance to listen to, identify, and empathize with the victim.
Such reticence causes the survivor's reaction of disengagement and
silence. Neither Shlomek nor Lena accept the solution that their
Israeli rescuers offer. Shlomek, in desperation, leaves his new
home, deliberately severing all contact with Yotam and the school.
Lena's decision to join Dora reflects her wish to leave the
confinement of the Castle rather than to start a new life in
Israel. Having articulated in fragmented, disconnected phrases, her
desire to "breathe the air...outside..."
(LC, 94), she
withdraws into complete silence.

[39] The conflicting discourses of Holocaust mourning and
Israeli rebirth end in a silence, which marks the separation
between rescuer and survivor. Gershon Shaked seems to address this
issue in his comments on Israeli Holocaust literature: "The
survivors remain vulnerable and tormented. The Zionist home did
save their bodies, but could not restore their spiritual repose"
(1985:288). As the two texts examined here suggest, spiritual peace
may lie beyond reach not only for the survivor, but for the Israeli
rescuer as well. The intense effort to modify, reshape, and
eventually obliterate the memory of the holocaustal terror attests
to the rescuer's constant preoccupation with the dark side of
Jewish history .The emphasis on a future of rebirth and
regeneration is nourished by an underlying consciousness of
degeneration and death. The glorification of Jewish
self-sufficiency and military prowess implies fear of victimization
and helplessness. Thus, the rescuers' often ruthless and
insensitive treatment of the survivors may have reduced the
Holocaust victims to silence, but it has not terminated the Israeli
discourse with Diaspora history.

[40]
Lady of the Castle and "The Witness" are part of
this continuing discourse. As mentioned earlier, Hareven's story
constitutes, in a sense, a sequel to Goldberg's play. The failure
of Shlomek's integration into Israeli society belies Dora's
prediction of the survivor's emotional rehabilitation in Israel.
"The Witness," however, narrated by Yotam thirty years after "the
Shlomek affair," also reveals the failure to actualize the ideal of
the "new" Israeli Jew oriented solely towards the future. Yotam's
need to explain and justify a distant event, which involves a
Holocaust survivor is indicative of the ongoing process of Israeli
self-definition vis-á-vis the destruction of the European
Diaspora. The possibility of a direct dialogue between rescuer and
survivor does not materialize in either of the texts. These
literary representations of post-Holocaust Israeli reality,
however, reflect the urgent need to break the silence and resume
the interrupted discourse between the diasporic past and the
Israeli present.

Notes

1Lady of the Castle
and "The Witness" are cited
hereafter as
LC and TW, respectively.